This invention relates to an environmental load evaluation system, an environmental load evaluation method and an environmental load evaluation program. More specifically, the invention relates to an information management technology of products that will be suitable for content evaluation of environmental impact substances and environmental load inventory evaluation.
A method called “LCA (Life Cycle Assessment)” for quantitatively evaluating a total environmental load of a certain product from its production till its disposal has been studied. To execute this LCA, an object product is first disassembled into parts. A product is generally constituted by parts and the parts are further constituted by slave parts. When the slave parts are serially assorted into sub-slave parts in a master-slave relation, end-parts that cannot be assorted any longer remain. Environmental load information of the end-part is the starting point of calculation of the environmental load information of each product. When the weight is serially built up from a layer of the end-parts up to a layer of master parts, the weight of the product can be calculated. When the contents of environmental impact substances such as heavy metals are serially built up, the total content of the environmental impact substances of the product can be acquired.
On the basis of the concept described above, a technology that adds environmental load information by using information collected from parts construction of a product and information acquired from a business acquaintance and calculates environmental load information of the product is known.
In an environmental information management system for managing a variety of environmental information useful for diversified environmental evaluation and management by grasping impacts on the environment that occurs in the stage selected from among a plurality of stages including raw materials of a product used, a period during production, a period during the use of the product, a time of disposal of the product and recycle of the product, the technology described above is proposed as an environmental information management system (JP-A-2003-196430) including an environmental information unification management unit that uniformly manages a plurality of environmental databases storing various kinds of environmental information, discriminates a storage position of necessary data from a plurality of environmental databases in accordance with a requirement of a user for executing environmental evaluation and management and for acquiring data, converts the data so acquired to integrated information having a unified format and provides the integrated information to the user as the requesting party.